Impact of Q value and gain-limit to the resolution of inverse Q filtering

Abstract

The earth Q-filter, including the energy dissipation of high frequency wave components and the velocity dispersion, distorts seismic wavelets, reduces the seismic resolution, and causes difficulty to obtain high resolution seismic data. The process of inverse Q-filter attempts to remove the Q-effect to produce high-resolution seismic data, but the numerical instability of inverse Q-filter amplitude compensation reduces the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio and limits its spatial resolution. In order to control the numerical instability, a large number of papers studying the gain-limit constrained inverse Q-filter amplitude compensation method. But, papers rarely discussing whether gain-limit constrained inverse Q-filter with the medium Q value can certainly improve the seismic data resolution or not, and what gain-limit and Q value should be used in inverse Q-filter in order to improve the resolution. In this paper, we focus on understanding the impact of Q value and gain-limit to seismic data resolution, and studying a novel method to optimize Q value within a certain gain-limit constrained inverse Q-filter amplitude compensation, by which we can achieve the optimum resolution seismic data. © 2014 Sinopec Geophysical Research Institute.